My mum (in her 80s) talks about having worked all her life too, but that's because she counts looking after her own house and children as work, which she believes it was. She doesn't see how annoying that is when she says it to her daughters who have all brought up children, run houses and worked full time throughout. She focuses on how much easier it was for us, as we had automatic washing machines.
I don't remember anyone in my mum's circle working when I was growing up. Maybe that's because if they'd been working I wouldn't have known them as they wouldn't have been at coffee mornings etc, but none of them worked. I only know one person of my generation who gave up work when she had children. Everyone else worked, even if some had a couple of years at home with babies.
To be fair though, in both cases people just did what was normal in their time and circumstances and it's probably not fair to blame them retrospectively for that. There were no nurseries or crèches for my mum's generation, so working mums would have had a much harder time if they didn't have family willing to do the childcare, and in any case they were paid less than men, had no maternity leave and so on, so it probably didn't seem worth it. Also, the system then was that women got their husband's pension if he predeceased them, and there were things like married man's tax allowance - things were different, and nobody can predict the direction things will take decades later. We all just make the best of life as we live it, really.